


For the Sake of Momentum

by BeautifulSoup



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam cannot turn down a dare, Boys Being Boys, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Series, Pre-The Raven Boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 15:10:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7897525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifulSoup/pseuds/BeautifulSoup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Ronan didn’t say anything, he knew better than that. He wanted to. All he wanted more than to say something was to march up to Robert Parrish’s door and introduce his fist to his face. Repeatedly. All he could do now was chew on the inside of his cheek and watch Adam’s careful movements. They’d been over it often enough that Adam’s feelings had been made very clear, and Ronan himself was skating too close to the edge today to keep the conversation anything approaching civil.<br/>“Wanna see something cool?” He asked instead.</i>
</p><p>It’s moving dolly day, and Ronan thinks Adam could do with a distraction. No alterior motives. The funny feeling in his stomach is just because he likes driving fast, that’s all</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Sake of Momentum

The red, hand-shaped ring around Adam’s arm made something hot and angry contract in Ronan’s chest. Adam caught him looking at it and tugged the sleeve of his shirt down, turning away.

It was too late for that, and his sleeve was too short. Last week he might have worn long sleeves and got away with it, but spring had rushed in warm and green, and it was too hot for that now. Instead, Adam rubbed the mark absently and avoided Ronan’s eyes.

“When’s Gansey getting here?” He asked, looking around as if searching for an escape route.

“Hell if I know,” Ronan said with a snarl, anger curdling hot and useless in his belly. “I’ve not memorised his schedule.” This wasn’t _exactly_ a lie: he generally knew what classes Gansey had and when, but his extra-curriculars were a mystery Ronan didn’t really care enough about to decode. He could have been at crew practice, could have been at a Model United Nations meeting, could just have fallen into a book in the library and lost five hours.

Adam huffed a breath out through his nose and looked around the massive space of Monmouth with narrowed eyes. His gaze lingered on the beer bottle Ronan had left on Gansey’s desk before flicking on. “Where’s Noah?”

“Do you think I’m their fucking PA or something, Parrish?” Ronan snapped, and that made Adam look at him. It was only a glance, dismissive, but it made Ronan feel like he’d won some small victory. “I don’t know.”

Adam rolled his eyes and strolled over to Gansey’s desk to flip through the book sitting open on top of a pile of papers and trash. His sleeve slid up his arm, revealing the mark again. From the back, Ronan could see a darker spot that looked roughly thumb-shaped which he suspected would turn purple as the bruise aged. His pulse thundered loud in his ears.

Ronan didn’t say anything, he knew better than that. He wanted to. All he wanted more than to say something was to march up to Robert Parrish’s door and introduce his fist to his face. Repeatedly. All he could do now was chew on the inside of his cheek and watch Adam’s careful movements. They’d been over it often enough that Adam’s feelings had been made very clear, and Ronan himself was skating too close to the edge today to keep the conversation anything approaching civil.

“Wanna see something cool?” He asked instead, when the silence became too much. Silence was Ronan’s domain, but his skin was too itchy, his fingers too restless for it now. He needed to get outside, needed to work off some of the impotent rage he could feel building in him. It was too early to go out looking for trouble in the BMW, too near what passed for rush hour in Henrietta, and something at the back of his mind told him he shouldn’t leave Adam alone right now.

He was, against his better judgement, getting used to Adam. The jealousy that had threatened to engulf him completely when Gansey first introduced them had ebbed, only rearing its head when Gansey and Adam laughed together at some inside joke or bent over some book or another to discuss it.

There was still something that irritated Ronan about him. Adam was smart. Adam was more than smart, he was brilliant, a genius, but he knew fuck-all about keeping secrets.

Ronan wasn’t a stranger to secrets. He was an expert in the field: which ones to keep, which ones to hint at, how to keep them. Each secret required its own method of keeping, like artefacts in an archive or a museum. A technique which might keep one secret safe forever might reveal another completely. It was a delicate business, one that Ronan had studied all his life. He would have been an eminent scholar in secret-keeping, if anyone had ever found out. He wasn’t an eminent scholar, but that was kind of the point.

Adam Parrish thought that the only way to keep a secret was to never talk about, or to lie outright. As far as Ronan could tell, Adam only had one secret, and he kept it terribly. What’s more, Adam _knew_ he kept it terribly.

It was written all over him: purplebluegreen ink fading on tanned skin, on his arms and his neck and his strange, high cheekbones. On his back and his chest. Most of all, it was in his eyes.

“What is it?” Adam asked, looking at Ronan over his shoulder, his fingers resting lightly on the book. There was something dull and distant in his eyes and the dark shadows beneath them.

“I can’t tell you, you need to see it.” Ronan looked at him for a moment longer and walked away.

“That’s not creepy or ominous at all, Lynch,” Adam said, but Ronan heard him follow him to the door.

The sun was bright in the sky and illuminated the scraggy weeds taking over the lot, waist-high in some places near the edges. It was a fierce source of joy for Ronan, the disreputable surrounds of Monmouth. Inside it was very much Gansey’s domain; out here, the jagged weeds and black tyre marks were Ronan’s. It was a wilderness in the middle of Henrietta, it was the meadows of his home, transplanted and transformed into something harsh and damaged. Ronan took a certain pride in keeping it that way.

He stalked towards the item he had uncovered the other day and stopped beside it. He grinned savagely at Adam.

“It’s a moving dolly,” Adam said, drawling it out. His hands were in his pockets and his face was decidedly unimpressed. His disinterest was a finger twanging the string of Ronan’s spine, making him stand up straight.

“Yeah, when you put it like that it sounds shit,” Ronan tried to keep his defensiveness out of his tone. “But dolly plus rope plus BMW? That’s the good shit.”

Adam didn’t say anything, but one of his pale eyebrows rose slowly up his forehead. Ronan grinned.

Adam’s eyes were too old for his face. Too old and too pale and too serious.

They grew younger as Ronan grinned at him.

“No way, Lynch.” Adam shook his head, but Ronan spotted the edge of a smile. His heart thrummed with the possibility of it, a premature shot of adrenaline in his bloodstream at the promise of speed.

“I can’t pull myself around,” he pointed out, and Adam raised his eyebrow again, meeting his gaze head-on. He was incredulous, but he was going to do it.

Ten minutes later, they had attached the dolly to the BMW with a series of deft knots Ronan was _not_ going to admit he had learnt in the boy scouts, and Adam had even found a spare scrap of rope to tie onto the dolly as a hand hold.

“Get on,” Ronan said, arms crossed over his chest to hide the anticipation was churning behind his ribs.

“What?” Adam asked, getting to his feet. “Why do I have to go first?”

“You think I’m trusting my car to you if this doesn’t work?”

Adam held his gaze for a long moment and read the dare in his eyes. He snorted a little and rolled his eyes, then settled himself swiftly and elegantly on the dolly, his legs crossed beneath him.

“You doing this or what?” Adam asked, his own challenge, and Ronan pulled his eyes away from Adam’s pale knuckles on the rope handle.

“Hope you brought clean underwear, Parrish,” he said as he climbed into the car and slammed the door. Adam’s reply was lost in the roar of the engine as he started it up.

Ronan hung out of the open window as he started the car forward, looking back to make sure the rope was holding. Adam was holding on tightly, eyes focused on the car’s number plate, jaw clenched.

“That all you’ve got, Lynch?” He called after a moment, and Ronan felt his pulse hammer in his jaw when Adam met his eyes. Just a response to a dare.

“Just making sure you weren’t gonna pussy out on me!”

He floored the gas, launching the BMW to the other side of the lot. Adam let out a whoop that was so unlike any sound Ronan had ever heard him make, wild and boyish and free, that Ronan couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

When he started to run out of lot, he yanked hard on the steering wheel to get them around the corner. He heard a yelp and a curse and stopped the car. By the time he got to the back and found where Adam had rolled to from the dolly, the other boy was on his back laughing and grinning wider than Ronan had ever seen.

“You asshole,” Adam got out between gasps. He looked up at Ronan, eyes crinkled almost shut from the force of his smile. There was no sign of the scared boy who tried so desperately to hide his bruises, the flighty prey animal that lived behind Adam’s eyes. He got to his feet just as Ronan was contemplating offering him a hand. “Go again, that was cheating and you know it. No way I’d’ve been able to hold on round that corner.”

Ronan just grinned at him and got back in the car. He didn’t take the corners any more gently. Adam held on through two of them, whooping with delight as he leaned into the corner.

The third time Adam skidded off laughing into the long grass, Ronan scrambled from the car and ran over to him.

“You’re driving this time,” he said, thrusting his hand down to Adam and pulling him to his feet. His hands were sweaty from the adrenaline. “You’re hogging the fun, loser.”

Adam punched him lightly on the shoulder and climbed in the driver’s door, grin still stretched over his face. Something light expanded in Ronan’s chest at this unfamiliar Adam, and he wondered vaguely if this was a good deed, and when the last time he’d done one of those was.

“I’ve never driven a stick before!” Adam shouted out the window, and Ronan’s chest collapsed to its normal size.

“You’re a fucking mechanic!” Ronan called back, his surprise curdling to a cruel laugh in his throat. He strolled up and stuck his head in the open window, resting his forearms on the sill. The car smelt like Adam, cheap soap and fresh sweat and the dust of the lot. This close, he could see a blade of old dried grass sticking out of Adam’s hair. He didn’t pluck it out.

“Knowing how they work and actually being able to drive them are different things,” Adam drawled, rolling his eyes up at him. “I’ve not exactly had the opportunity.”

“Just… push the clutch in, move the stick into first, press the gas and let the clutch out, _slowly_. It’s easy, just stay in first if you want. I’m not letting you pull me around on your fucking bike after you’ve had the whole experience.”

He stood by the window as Adam followed his instructions. He nearly stalled two times but managed to save it, and finally got it moving on the third attempt.

“Just keep it in first!” Ronan yelled, and jumped onto the dolly as it was moving. The BMW raged its protests against the gear as Adam got the speed up. The first time Ronan fell off it was a blur of black car, yellow grass, grey tarmac, and road-burn. By the fourth time he was curling into it and rolling off the impact.

They were still taking turns when Gansey arrived. Adam turned at the first glimpse of the Camaro turning the corner and promptly fell off. Ronan stopped the car and got out to find him flat on his back, laughing like the first time. He held out a hand to help him up again, but Adam just pulled him to the ground, so that by the time Gansey had pulled up they were lying side by side trying to get their breath back through gales of laughter.

He stood over them, his hair wet and expression concerned.

Ronan’s chest was aching from laughter and his forearms were grazed and bloody from his tumbles, but he felt lighter than he had for a long time.

“I’m teaching you how to drive a fucking stick shift,” Ronan said later, when Gansey had forced them both into the bathroom to clean their scrapes. Adam looked at him, pale eyes calculating. In a moment he was smiling, small and warm in a way Ronan had only ever seen directed at Gansey. Ronan’s stomach fizzed with something that might have been the beer he’d just swallowed on an empty stomach or might have been the knowledge of a good deed well done.

 “That’d be cool.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> [hmu](http://pygmypyncher.tumblr.com/)


End file.
